History of Computer Programming Languages

In 1942 the US Government made ENIAC it replaced physical language with electrical. It could only be programmed by pre-setting switches and rewiring the whole thing.

History of Computer Programming Languages

Short Code

In 1949 a computer language called short code required to change statements into 1s and 0s (Binary). It was the first step to complex languages.

First Compiler

FORTRAN / COBOL

Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper was really first women to get into programming, she also was an admiral in the army, a good book that doesn't have to much information would be Technology: Cool Women Who Code

Grace Hopper in 1947 wrote the first compiler (www.b yte.com) Compilers are programs that turn statements into 1s and 0s which make it easier for programs to understand

AI (Artificial Intelligence)

In 1958 John McCarthy made an language designed for AI (Artificial Inteligence), According to my source "wrote code in parse trees, which are usually a compiler-generated intermediary between higher syntax (such as in C or Java) and lower-level code."

conditional control transfer

IMB, in 1957 created FORTRAN it used If and Do statements, even though today that is simple, that was a very big step back then. FORTRAN was not very good at input/output, which was what buisnisses wanted. In 1959 when buisness computing was taking off COBOL was made. COBOL is a lot like essays and had good grammar so it was easier to understand and teach to buissnessmen.

Pascal

The second concept John Von Neumann made is called conditional control transfer (www.softlord.com). Which is small blocks of code that can be jumped to in any order. According to my source "The second part of the idea stated that computer code should be able to branch based on logical statements such as IF (expression) THEN, and looped such as with a FOR statement." It then caused the idea of libraries(code that can be used over and over, J-Query is a good example.)

Pascal was made in 1968, it had good input/output It had case statements that work like this (italicized is variable):

CASE expression OF

possible-value:

code

possible-value-2:

code

etc.

END

C

C was made in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie. According to my source " The transition in usage from the first major languages to the major languages of today occurred with the transition between Pascal and C." And "C uses pointers extensively and was built to be fast and powerful at the expense of being hard to read. But because it fixed most of the mistakes Pascal had, it won over former-Pascal users quite rapidly." C was also being developed for the new unix system.

Shared Program Technique

OOP

John Von Neumann in 1945 made two important concepts. 1. Shared-Program-Technique (www.softlord.com) Stated that computer hardware should be simple and that there should be instructions to re-program instead of rewiring.

In the early 1980s OOP or Object-Oriented-Programming was being developed. Bjarne Stroustroup liked the method and made C++, it got released in 1983.

Electrical Language

Difference Machine

Java

Sun Microsystems thought that a portable language would be good, so they started developing it. The language evantually turned into Java. It is a very good language, but programs that run with it are slow.

Charles Babbage’s difference machine made in 1822 had the first language, which was physical motion.

HTML

Hyper-text markup language was made in 1990 (The date I picked because it seemed there were many) it was developed off of XML and is used to make websites today. Info from wikipedia.

My main source is http://cs.brown.ed u/~adf/programmi ng_languages.html The links he has listed no longer exist :(